He came, he swore, he ... didn’t conquer.
Ten days after being named White House communications director, Anthony Scaramucci is already out, according to a report by the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman, Michael Shear, and Glenn Thrush.
The Times reports that the change came at the request of John Kelly, who started his tenure as White House chief of staff Monday.
This is ... completely normal. Scaramucci was an extremely unusual pick for the communications director job in the first place, since he had never actually worked in press or communications before. He was such an odd choice that on the very day he got the job, press secretary Sean Spicer announced that he would resign in protest.
Furthermore, just days after being named to the job, Scaramucci ended up in hot water, by going on a profane, angry tirade to the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza in which he insulted several of his co-workers, including then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus.
At first, it seemed that President Donald Trump didn’t really mind — remarkably enough, it was Priebus, not Scaramucci, who was ousted from the administration at the end of last week.
But it appears Kelly was very much unimpressed with Scaramucci’s qualifications for the job or his performance in it so far, and wasn’t exactly thrilled when Scaramucci said this weekend that he would still report to Trump directly and not to Kelly.
“Mr. Kelly made clear to members of the White House staff at a meeting Monday morning that he is in charge,” the Times reporters write.
The Scaramucci Era was brief but eventful
After months in which President Trump had been unhappy with his White House’s communications team, he finally arrived at a rather outside-the-box solution on Friday, July 21: he would put Anthony Scaramucci in charge of it.
Scaramucci, a wealthy Trump fundraiser from the finance sector, had never actually worked in press or communications when he was named to the post. But he had appeared on television defending Trump many times, and the president apparently was impressed by those appearances. So he named him White House Communications Director and said that press secretary Sean Spicer would report to him.
Spicer, naturally, was furious, and quickly said he would resign rather than report to Scaramucci. And Trump accepted his resignation (though it technically hasn’t gone into effect yet, suggesting it’s not impossible that Spicer might even stick around now that Scaramucci is gone).
With Spicer out of his way, Scaramucci set his sights on another official he’d long had bad blood with — chief of staff Reince Priebus. (Per the Huffington Post’s Vicky Ward, Scaramucci blamed Priebus for preventing him from getting a different White House post back in January.)
On Wednesday of last week, Scaramucci called up Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker and went on an astonishing rant, without ever bothering to take himself off the record. In it, Scaramucci threatened to “fucking kill” all White House leakers, said Steve Bannon was “trying to suck [his] own cock,” and said Reince Priebus was “a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac.” He also falsely accused Priebus of leaking his financial disclosures and said he’d called the FBI and Department of Justice on him.
Finally, Scaramucci openly admitted, at the end of the conversation, that he was planning to “start tweeting some shit to make this guy [Priebus] crazy” — and then did so:
Lizza published a report of his conversation with Scaramucci, and it went viral, even taking precedence over the administration’s push for the Senate to repeal Obamacare on cable news at the end of last week.
Finally, late Friday afternoon, word broke that Priebus was out — seemingly suggesting that Scaramucci had won.
But there was one small problem — Trump had chosen Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, a no-nonsense former general, as his new chief of staff. And Kelly apparently had little respect for or use for Scaramucci. So out the door he went.
This is maybe the most normal thing the Trump administration has ever done
When John Kelly was named White House chief of staff on Friday, there was a lot of skepticism about whether he’d really be empowered to straighten out this fractured White House.
In particular, it seemed downright odd that Scaramucci was staying on and bragging that he’d still report to President Trump directly rather than going through Kelly as part of a clear chain of command.
And how effective could Kelly really be if the freewheeling Scaramucci remained in a key job he was completely unqualified for, without facing any consequences for his absurdly unprofessional rant to Lizza?
It turns out that Kelly seemed to be asking the same questions — and acting to solve them. Jonathan Swan of Axios reports that “almost immediately” after Kelly was sworn in this morning, he told Scaramucci that he was out.
It’s a positive early sign for Kelly’s tenure, since it demonstrates that unqualified people who act unprofessionally will face consequences, even if they’re friends of Trump.
Still, in ousting Scaramucci, Kelly is only solving a problem that has existed for a mere 10 days. To really turn this White House around, he’s going to have to somehow convince the president himself to dramatically change his behavior — something that will surely be a far more difficult task.